Thoughts on Life, Love, Politics, Hypocrisy and Coming Out in Mid-Life

Sunday, June 28, 2015

"Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner" - Another Christofascist Lie

In the wake of Friday's historic marriage ruling, some of the Christofascists are consumed with spittle flecked rants threatening civil disobedience and other forms of resistance to the Supreme Court's ruling. Others are trying to appear less extreme and are repeating a standard Christofascist lie that they hate the sin - ie., homosexuality - but love the sinner. Frankly, it's a lie and a crock of horseshit in my view. You do not "love" someone when you try to deprive someone of civil rights and equality under the law. Or when you depict gays as not much better than diseased vermin and/or would be child molesters.

Thus, "hate the sin, love the sinner" is merely how Christian bigots try to (i) avoid facing the fact that they are deliberately
discriminating against and harming others, and (ii) convince others that they are not foul bigots. It's the height of hypocrisy,
something that I believe sadly is the number one hallmark of self-styled
conservative Christians. It also ignores several realities, the first being
that "deeply held religious belief" has been used for centuries to
justify/excuse hate, bigotry, discrimination against others and far worse
horrors. A piece in Religion Dispatches lays blame at the feet of anti-gay Christofascists. Here are excerpts:

LGBTQ homelessness and suicide are natural consequences of the
perpetuation of views denying the full humanity of lesbian, gay, bi,
pan, trans, queer, and all non-heteronormative individuals. Any theology
rejecting their full affirmation is clearly tantamount to such denial,
as we now have a wealth of testimony that the vast majority of LGBTQ
individuals do not experience their sexual orientation or gender
identity as a choice. If you like, you can believe in a tyrannical god
who creates some people only to condemn them for something innate to
their created personhood. I will not.

Those who are celebrating the “tipping point,” it seems to me, are
failing to hold their co-religionists accountable for the harm they have
done to all of us who could not conform to the demands of the
fundamentalist evangelical worldview—particularly to members of the
LGBTQ community. They are also de facto refusing to acknowledge their
own complicity in that harm.

There are calls
to drop the hurtful and condescending “love the sinner, hate the sin”
rhetoric, which is surely an improvement, but it’s also an attempt to square the circle.
As long as the belief persists that same-sex partnerships and
transgender identities are inherently sinful, this belief will do
psychological harm to LGBTQ people born into evangelical communities.

I appreciate the Christians, including evangelicals, who are trying to
do better, those who are living up to Christ’s example of radical
inclusivity that I see as the spirit of the Gospel. The problem is that
an awful lot of Christians, particularly in evangelical culture,
continue to fetishize the letter and lose sight of the spirit. And not
only that, but instead of accepting that we live in a pluralist society,
too many of these evangelicals, with a huge assist from conservative
Catholics, go off in the name of “religious freedom” to fight tooth and
nail to keep members of the LGBTQ community from enjoying the same
rights and freedoms they do.

The second is that the United States of America was founded as a
SECULAR nation with no established religion. One's religious beliefs or lack
thereof should have ZERO bearing on one's civil legal rights. For those who
have not done so, read the preamble of Thomas Jefferson's draft of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (which predates the U.S. Constitution) and see
how Jefferson tears apart those who would link one's civil rights to one's
compliance with particular religious beliefs. Stated another way, Jefferson -
and other Founding Fathers did so as well - eloquently condemned the very
behavior we see virtually daily from the so-called Christian Right (who are
neither Christian or right) - i,e, those whom I refer to as the
Christofascists:

Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free;

That all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or
burthens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of
hypocrisy and meanness, and therefore are a departure from the plan of
the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind
yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his
Almighty power to do,

That the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well
as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired
men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own
opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as
such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and
maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and
through all time;

That our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry,

Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to
frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry
whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in
his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his
religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess,
and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and
that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil
capacities.

I remain convinced that if one wants to know why 34% of Millennials have walked away
from organized religion, look no farther than those "godly
Christians" who are condemning yesterday's marriage ruling. These
"Christians" truly make the Pharisees in the Gospels look like nice
decent folk in comparison.

The other thing that the Supreme Court noted in
yesterday's ruling is that sexual orientation is something that is immutable.
It's a part of you that you cannot change. You can try to deny it and try to
pretend it's not an unchangeable part of you, but that is only an exercise in
self-delusion. In contrast, religion and religious belief are 100% a choice and
can be changed simply by walking away from past indoctrination and thinking for
one self.

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Out gay attorney in a committed relationship; formerly married and father of three wonderful children; sometime activist and political/news junkie; survived coming out in mid-life and hope to share my experiences and reflections with others.
In the career/professional realm, I am affiliated with Caplan & Associates PC where I practice in the areas of real estate, estate planning (Wills, Trusts, Advanced Medical Directives, Financial Powers of Attorney, Durable Medical Powers of Attorney); business law and commercial transactions; formation of corporations and limited liability companies and legal services to the gay, lesbian and transgender community, including birth certificate amendment.

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